You are strong enough to work through your grief. You are not alone in your pain, and it won’t be this hard forever.
Miscarriages are one of the most common experiences that most people prefer not to talk about. Many people don’t realize just how common it is until they are faced with it head on.
Regardless of how prepared you are for this possible outcome, you may still be overcome with grief and shock. You want to muscle through it, and you want to achieve acceptance. And you may feel like everyone around you has begun coping with it and moving on. So why can’t you?
The nature of a miscarriage is that it’s largely invisible to others, but not to you. You feel the loss acutely, on a physical level. But those who are less intimately involved will not feel it as strongly. So not only are you grieving, but you may also feel that you have to disguise it, and deal with it on your own.
And grief has many aspects after a miscarriage. For one, you have no closure. One day you were pregnant, and the next you were not. This shift is jarring, and there is no longer any physical evidence of the connection you had with your unborn child.
You might also be struggling with guilt. Maybe you have convinced yourself that there was something you could have done differently, or some warning sign you missed. These anxieties eat at you, often resulting in anger that is either directed inwards or outwards, if not both.
You may even find yourself lashing out at your partner. They offer you support, but you’re finding it difficult to let them. Physically speaking, this miscarriage only happened to you. And so even though you are both dealing with the same grief, you are approaching it from different perspectives. This may add to your feeling of isolation.
At a time when you are already feeling such acute loss, adding to that in any way is bound to cause instances of lashing out. However, this may have the unfortunate effect of pushing your partner away, even when you need their support more than ever.
The goal of our counseling will be to find closure and create healthy coping mechanisms. While the grief of your miscarriage will always be with you in some form, counseling will help it to become far less present over time.
Finding comfort in your partner
Your therapist will also help you connect over this experience with your loved ones, including your partner who is going through this with you. They will assist you in opening up to the people closest to you, allowing them a window into your grief.
And they will guide your partner to support you as well. Even with therapy, you may still be prone to lashing out, especially the more recent the miscarriage is. But your therapist will help you both understand the other’s differing perspective.
Acknowledging that difference is key to bridging the gap that may have been created by your grief. Your partner needs to listen to you and provide support, even when they feel discouraged that they can’t fix this. And they need to show you that they are hurting too, rather than trying to put on a brave face.
